Mirrors 1

People love dancing in front of mirrors in self-satisfied vanity, as if their own beauty is the highest beauty. Everything else in the world that is beautiful is only beautiful insofar as it is pleasing or subordinate to them. This is subjectivity, not simply on a personal level, but on a larger, more contextual level. Pain is pain. Joy is joy. It is what it is, and it is no lesser or greater when it is yours.

Retrograde Motion

Is it the fear of being alone? Is it the illusion of concern? Perhaps it is the cataclysmic bizarreness of one thinking mind interacting with another. How do we account for shame? Why does the presence of another person hamper our honesty? Why do we hold back? The fears of judgment and subjugation are the blinders that eliminate your peripheral vision. We are like a predatory horse, a beast of burden turned aggressive ruthless fugitive. We have escaped from the bonds of meaningless isolation, been imprisoned by stolen freedom and pursued by inescapable detriments of every persuasion. Everybody is horrible and frightening. Everybody is capable of atrocity in all degrees. We all are, because in some layer of our terrified consciousness, we harbor the belief that other people aren’t real, at least not as real as ourselves. Goodwill and charity are easy when no danger is involved. I have done nothing to deserve my comforts. Nor have you. There is no such thing as “deserve.” There is no such thing as debt or justice. There is only malice, revenge, and vested interest in the well-being of another. Everybody hurts the same way. We all want to get back home. It all feels so unnatural. It is an itch that cannot be scratched. Words like “me,” “I,” and “mine” are self-referential utterances that point at nothing but themselves. They are signs without meaning, signifiers with no signified. These absurdities allow us to fumble our way through the dark, just like when the lights go out and you are somewhere unfamiliar and must navigate by senses you aren’t used to using. Those tender, familiar crutches start to become more important when we begin to see the perfect darkness take shape into monsters. Perspiration and tightened bowels become the limits of our knowledge, and create our prejudicial attitudes towards nonexistent things. It is all sincere. It is completely natural. With what alternative are we left? We cannot move in a vacuum. Locomotion requires objects with greater mass than ourselves for reaction. Action can only be reaction. There is no groundless movement. Even more upsetting, there is no apparent causa sui at the root. There is no root. Anchors are futile, but create the necessary rigidity that allows you to find a point of reference and navigate the soup. They are the objects with greater mass than you. Nausea is what happens when you learn that you aren’t moving, but are instead simply rearranging the objects around you.

Behind the Wall

Behind the wall there is nothing. Behind the wall there’s a vacuous lack. You’re standing precipitously close, and you’re only separated by this wall. You’re somewhere on the edge of nowhere. Nowhere is on the other side of the wall, but it’s not connected to it. Nowhere cannot be connected to anywhere, or nowhere becomes somewhere via its proximity to it. Nowhere must be completely detached and entirely separate. That’s why the wall exists. It’s an epistemological condom. Once you’re nowhere, you can never again be somewhere. Travel is impossible once you’re nowhere, because you’re already nowhere, and there’s nowhere else to go. Movement within nowhere is absurd and unintelligible. Location is a purely relational concept that is only meaningful if you’re somewhere.

Trains

Sometimes I can still hear the trains at night. We live further up the hill now than we did then. We can’t hear them as clearly as before, or as constantly as we used to, but on a quiet night they’re still there to carry me to sleep. They’re groaning along the Ohio River, laying on the horn.

Sleeping Badly – Part 4

It’s late, and I can’t sleep. My mind races and chases sleep further away. My empty stomach rumbles, and that’s not helping. My wife’s periodic, convulsive fits of coughing exacerbate the problem, and I move to the living room to get away from the coughing, to sleep on the couch. I’m suddenly terrified by the weight of my mortality. I’m 28 years old, safe, healthy, strong, and scared of dying while lying on the couch in my living room at two in the morning. I think about what it will be like to die, and if I’ll be ready for it, if I’d be ready if I had to die right now. The absurdity of needing to be ready for something so absolutely inevitable occurs to me. I laugh at myself. I just can’t get my head around the permanent end of myself, though. I hold onto the thought, and I focus on it. I begin to panic, but I sustain it. The street lights are coming through the front windows of my house, and the plant on the windowsill is casting a shadow in the wall. The shadow is moving a little every time a car passes, and it’s actually a little bigger than life size. It looks like a massive cluster of insects, teeming on the wall, framed in moonlight and headlights. I hate insects, but I laugh again. In this solitude and comfort, I want nothing more than to sleep.